The Year It Rained

This was our 5th year to get a 3 day pass to the Austin City Limits festival! It’s kind of a tradition for us, since we started going to first year we started dating.

This year things were a little different. They moved the festival to October since every other year, the weekend of ACL has been one of the hottest weekends of the summer. It never fails the weekend before and after would be beautiful weather and then the weekend of ACL, we would get a blast of hot weather. As much fun as ACL is, there is something not so fun about spending all day outside in 100+ heat with 65,000+ other people. This year everyone was looking forward to cooler temperatures as well as the nice green grass that had been planted all over Zilker Park.

Friday was perfect. The high was only 82 and the park looked great! Isn’t Austin pretty? :)

We started off by getting to park here…

 

Yes, at 4 months pregnant I rode on the back of Jon’s motorcycle so that we could take advantage of the free motorcycle/scooter parking. We were only a few yards from the entrance. It’s only a 5 mile drive from our house and it was great not to be stuck in traffic or have to walk from far away.

The entrance to the festival

The nice green grass

We had a great time on Friday, but by the time the last band played (Kings of Leon) I was exhausted!

Saturday, we started the day off with a big breakfast at Dan’s…yum! Then we headed to the park that afternoon. It was pretty cool (only 76 degrees), we even had to bring jackets! We were there for about an hour before the rain came. It really wasn’t too bad. We had ponchos and a tarp to sit on. It was pretty difficult to eat in the rain, but other than that it was a pretty good day. I didn’t take any pictures because my iphone was in a plastic bag the whole time.

Sunday…oh Sunday. It basically rained from Saturday afternoon until Sunday morning. We were expecting it to be a little muddy, but we were wrong. It was not a little muddy…

It was a lot muddy! I don’t think there was more than a couple patches of wet grass, everything else was mud. I lasted a couple of hours but then Jon brought me home. They must have used some natural fertilizer or something when they did the big overhaul on the grass this year and the entire parked smelled like a huge farm. It was awful!

All and all this was a fun but different year. Being 4 months pregnant definitely made me much more tired and my newly found excellent sense of smell made Sunday pretty difficult.  We are thinking we might have to skip next year, but hopefully we will be able to continue the tradition for many years to come.

-Lauren-